This is my first post, so I'll say a little about what I have been doing for the last few years (outside of the home and my teaching of patent law and IP Clinic). Following some earlier work that I had done in the IP Clinic for the Public Interest Intellectual Property Advisors on the consistency of disclosure of origin requirements with international IP treaties, I was asked by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 2005 to draft a report with Carlos Correa for the Eight Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity on the relationship between the intellectual property sytem (particularly patents) and the access and benefit sharing requirements of the CBD...

The Colombian ministry of health has decided not to declare access to HIV/AIDS medicine lopinavir + ritonavir a matter of public interest. The ministry's decision halts government consideration of a compulsory license request, initiated in July 2008, that would introduce price-lowering competition with Abbott's Kaletra.

There's a cottage industry of naysayers who seek attention by deriding all things Internet. A member of this crew, Mark Helprin, has put together a collection of pages bound together under the title Digital Barbarism which was printed by Harper Collins.

The Japan-US Joint proposal for the Anticounterfeiting Trade Agreement includes provisions that enable border guards to seize certain goods, either at the request of IP owners, or on their own. Under the proposal, goods other than counterfeits may be seized.

UAEM has done a brief analysis of the draft regulations for the South African "Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act" of 2008. The legislation is similar to the US Bayh-Dole act which governs the patenting and licensing of the results of publicly funded research.

Angie McCarthy from the WCL Women and the Law Program has compiled abstracts from those presenting at WCL's Sixth Annual IP/Gender Symposia. This year's conference, covers "Female Fan Culture and Intellectual Property," and will be held April 23-24.

I am pleased to share with our community that Professor Peter Jaszi has been selected as the 2009 recipient of the Champion of Intellectual Property Award (the ChIP Award) by the Intellectual Property Law Section of the DC Bar.

Another lifesaving treatment is being denied to the world’s poor through global pricing that provides access only to the nation’s wealthy. A biologic drug called pegylated interferon can cure Hepatitis C (HCV) in over half of the patients that take it. But at a global price of over $20,000 a year, only a small portion of the world’s 150 million people living with HCV can afford access.

Following the meeting on Copyright User Rights and South African Documentary Film, March 22-24, 2009, in Cape Town, South Africa’s Documentary Filmmakers’ Alliance and Black Filmmakers Network and American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (partner organizations) adopted the following plan of action...